ENTREVESTOR: LifeRaft helps fight online violence

LifeRaft, a Halifax startup focused on detecting signs of dangerous behaviour on social media, will launch its beta test this week with the participation of several educational and law enforcement groups.

LifeRaft is a social media monitoring tool that detects language signalling threats, cyberbullying and other signs that people may pose a threat to themselves or other people.

While most social media monitoring systems are used in marketing or measuring public opinion, LifeRaft is designed to help educational bodies and law enforcement agencies ensure public safety.

The company is being spun out of Citrus Mobile Solutions, a Halifax tech consultancy best known for its mobile real estate product TxT2look. The firm has spent about eight months developing LifeRaft and is now launching a 30-day test.

Three U.S. universities, a Canadian university and half a dozen law enforcement agencies are participating in the test. Citrus is planning a full public launch of the product once it assesses the results.

The tool “allows us to listen to what’s going on in social media and drill down and see what’s happening on a granular level,” said Citrus CEO Brian Perry. “We can understand the context of their discussions and in most cases can identify their geo-location.”

LifeRaft aims to help solve several serious issues. It can detect cyberbullying and therefore help schools, universities and school boards intervene before bullying results in a crisis. It can help identify people who strongly resent authority or the police, or could even be planning violence at a school.

Using LifeRaft, authorities can tell in real time who posted the questionable material and where they are, and can even see an archived street view of the building they are in. Authorities can also follow people of interest to make sure their social media posts don’t indicate they’re about to do something violent or harmful.

Perry said the device does not violate people’s privacy because social media posts are public information and police departments already monitor it. For example, the New York Police Department already has 12 employees assigned full time to monitoring social media. LifeRaft will simply improve the efficiency of such work, said Perry.

Citrus has been working with several partners in developing the product, including the Saint Mary’s University Sobey School of Business and the computer science department at Dalhousie University.

Perry said Citrus plans to develop LifeRaft as its own company, with the new entity employing about eight of the 10 people now working in the service company.

He said Citrus expects to be able to continue with its other work, in part because it contracts out to overseas developers. In the past year, it has even helped two of these programmers move to Halifax from Uruguay.

To finance the early development of LifeRaft, Perry and his team are now working on raising $1.5 million in seed financing. They have started talks with a few potential investors, he said.

Citrus’s main activity is custom software development, focusing on building and managing SMS communications and mobile technology platforms. The company evolved into this line of work by initially launching and operating SaaS text message solutions for the real estate and mobile marketing industries.